Nina McConigley

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others.

McConigley's new novel is How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The book had another title while I was working on it. It was originally called The Call of Migratory Things. Which is a line from Angels in America. That play had a huge influence on me, and since my book was set in the 80’s, I loved it as a title. When I first started working on the book with my editor, she asked me about the title. And mentioned she felt it was very lyrical, and made people think of more typical immigrant narratives – a more familiar story. I agreed with her. We agreed my book wasn’t that. It was weird – so why not have a little cheekier title? We went through a list and quickly settled on How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder. It summed up the book – race, murder, a kind of how-to. And then I saw the cover image of anti-freeze and knew it was all perfect. The book is serious, but also really playful, and I think the title captures that.

What's in a name?

The names of my two main characters were very deliberate. Two white colonial women writers I grew up reading were Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer. I devoured their books. And so, I knew the mother in the book would have also read them and named her girls after them – Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayyar. The mother’s maiden name being Ayyar, sealed the joke. I think the whole book is playing with colonialism, and the names felt like another space to play and poke at certain structures.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would not have thought a teenage life was worth writing about. Growing up in Wyoming, I was always waiting for my life to begin. Which I thought would only happen if I left Wyoming. So, knowing that I am writing about Noxzema, summer camp, and Ouija boards would have made me laugh. I thought literature was only Shakespeare and Austen.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I wrote the bookends to my novel first – the beginning and the end. After many false starts to the book and messy drafts, I decided to structure the book within a year. I began in January 1986, and then I wrote December 1986. And I told myself every chapter in between would lead to and earn that ending. But I did mess with the prologue and Chapter 1 many times. In your mind, you think this is what people will read first, so if it doesn’t grab them, they’ll stop reading. So, I tinkered and changed things a lot. Especially in the prologue, which I know some readers hate. But is often a convention of a thriller/mystery.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

A little bit of both. I certainly have been a biracial Indian girl growing up in Wyoming in the 1980’s. My dad is a geologist. But many of Georgie’s experiences and life are fiction. I haven’t killed anyone to my knowledge. But I see her wide-eyedness, her observations, and her feelings about race and Wyoming to be similar to mine. You get, as a writer, to create a better version or a different version of yourself. You get to make the comeback, to change the way history operated.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I think the landscape of Wyoming is my biggest influence. To live with so much open space and emptiness, perhaps contributed to the slimness of my novel. It’s spare. Also, a lot of visual artists. The Indian artists Hemali Vadalia, Renluka Maharaj, Suchitra Mattai, Maya Varadaraj, and Shyama Golden inspired me no end. I would look at their art when stuck. And much of my book was written to the Tamil musician Ganavya. Her work is otherworldly. Her voice and music were prayers to me. Also, world events. A lot happened while I worked on this book – the pandemic, George Floyd, two elections – and I wanted my art to be my activism.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Writers Read: Nina McConigley.

--Marshal Zeringue